No need for a poker face here because you’ll be enlightened with all the poker news that’s happening. Find out about new sites and their launch dates. We will give you the dope on what the pros are up to, WSOP winners and where the best online sites to play at.

Microgaming's MPN has expanded their Indian Poker Network with Mercury Poker joining the line up that includes Poker Nation and Khelplay.com.
Created by Poker Enthusiasts
Mercury Poker was created by a group of poker enthusiasts know the value of listening to players wants and needs. A Thursday press release from Microgaming notes that Mercury Poker ticks all the boxes for poker players and has gone live on the Indian Poker Network to achieve their mission.
Exciting Opportunity

PokerStars Partners, the marketing arm of The Stars Group (formerly Amaya) responsible for promoting the popular brand, announced to advertising affiliates on Tuesday that all promotion of the PokerStars brand in Australia must cease immediately.
Government Bans Online Casinos and Poker Sites
August 9 the Australian Senate passed the Internet Gambling Amendment Bill 2016 after the bill had passed the house in similar form in June.

A poker tournament that lasted a bit over three hours was put on by Microgaming at ICE 2017 this year, and it was all for charity. The event included more than 80 people, and there were thousands of dollars donated to charity as a result. It was a great occasion, and it goes to show once again that Microgaming continues to do work to give back.
The Three Biggest Winners
The top prize went to Alon from Crazy Vegas.

Full Flush Poker is a dead online poker room that was initially launched as the main room of the Equity Poker Network, an emerging online poker network that was supposed to be a non-profit type of venture. Previously, the poker room and the network both shut down around the same time, and an estimated total of over $2 million was left owed to players, affiliates and others associated with the venture in various ways.

Bovada Poker has been a staple in US online poker since 2011 when it was split from the Bodog brand. This came right around the time that the Department of Justice announced that the Wire Act did not apply to online poker, which in turn meant that the UIGEA did not apply unless online poker was illegal on a state level. This dynasty has come to another change, however, as they are now closing their doors.
Details on the Close
On September 30, 2016, online poker will be done and over with.

One of the biggest innovations in terms of new formats of poker becoming popular over the past few years has been three-handed jackpot sit-and-go tournaments. These events give you a chance to win a pretty significant top prize relative to your buy-in because they use a distribution of available top prizes instead of using the traditional SNG prize format.

Earlier this month, the EGR B2B awards were held, and Microgaming walked away as a pretty big winner. Their poker network, known as MPN for Microgaming Poker Network, picked up the EGR B2B award for Poker Software of the Year. This is pretty impressive because this is the fourth year in a row that they've been able to do this. Their wins show that they have come a long way in the software arena since a decade ago when the network was known as Prima Poker and had sub-par software for the times.

The situation with online poker in the United States is extremely tricky. Because the game is unlikely to be regulated on a national level, it's up to the states to regulate things one at a time. New York has been one of the states putting up the most resistance to regulating the industry, but a recent development has put players in a position of being a bit more hopeful than before.

In the past, Vladimir Putin has expressed an interest in legalizing online poker because of the sport and competition elements of the game. A lot of industry experts assumed it most likely wouldn't actually happen, but they could have been mistaken. Business Insider published an article recently that builds a pretty strong case for Russia being about to legalize the industry instead of carrying on with the current ban.
The Importance of Regulation

One of the tools that online poker players have is boycotting and organizing sit-out protests. Several years ago when France first introduced legislation for regulating the online gambling industry, they set the rules for taking a rake in online poker games so high that it made no sense for anyone to play them. A big boycott and sit-out protest on the French-facing PokerStars site was enough to get the attention of officials and to get those rules changed.

Something that started happening a few years ago in the poker world is the concept of the high roller tournament. The basic idea was to have tournament buy-ins of $25,000 and $50,000 to thin the field and offer an atmosphere that consists more of the elites battling it out than thousands of people hoping to get a good run of cards. The Super High Roller $200,000 event in the WPT National Philippines Festival of Poker, however, is even bigger than that.
Why Have High Roller Tournaments?

There are a handful of gambling-related movies that have become classics. Rounders is the greatest poker movie of all time with Matt Damon and Ed Norton, and the older Cincinnati Kid is a classic as well. There have been multiple attempts to create new films based on gambling themes, especially poker, but none of them have really gained the steam behind them that those two films did.

High stakes and high volume players on PokerStars staged a boycott for the first three days of December, and it's not clear how effective it was. While they definitely brought attention to their complaints, the main effect was in the high stakes games, and how much that effects the company or the general player pool is difficult to measure. Overall, it would seem that the timing was poor and that there are too many variables to determine its effectiveness.
The Problem With the Boycott

The Amaya Gaming Group has made a number of big changes since taking over PokerStars back near the middle of 2014, and they've expanded in several different directions in the process. They seem to be going after casual players after a new move has them unveiling their new Jackpot Poker game. This free play game will appear on iOS, Android and Facebook, and it's based primarily around their Spin & Go tournament format. It's aimed at casual players.
The Spin & Go Format

When the Amaya Gaming Group took over PokerStars in mid-2014, players knew that there would be some big changes coming because the acquisition was a part of a nine-figure deal. Changes came very swiftly for PokerStars players, as expected, and they added casino games and eventually brought on the StarsDraft daily fantasy league. They also announced a number of major changes for the rewards program in 2016, and many players have banded together saying that these changes are dishonest.

A few years ago, the World Series of Poker and ESPN came together to form the idea that later became known as the November Nine. The concept was that they would have the final table for the Main Event play out live on television several months after the rest of the tournament had already happened.

When bitcoin started becoming pretty popular a couple of years ago, a lot of people pointed out that it had the potential to work out well as a funding method for online gambling. The idea is that it has a built-in level of privacy since transactions are largely anonymous, and since it's decentralized, it would be hard for any one government or entity to bring it down. Bryan Micon thought the same thing, and he was sentenced earlier this week for acting on those ideas.
Seals With Clubs

The Main Event of the World Series of Poker is playing out this coming Sunday as a part of the "November Nine" concept that was created to help get more interest in poker. The idea behind this concept is that coverage of the tournament series normally happens over a course of a few months, normally after the winner of the Main Event had already been decided. By having the actual final table play live months later, it provides a climatic finish to fans of the series.

Halloween is only days away, and both Intertop and Juicy Stakes are offering a players to get in on the action with a great tournament event. The event in question is a $500 guarantee bounty tournament that's going to run on November 1 at 4 pm Eastern. The entry fee is just $3.30, and the bounty style of the tournament means that things could turn into a trick or a treat every single time you or your opponent go all-in.
How the Bounty Tournament Format Works

Black Friday was an event on April 15, 2011 that put players in a position with a lot fewer options for enjoying online poker. PokerStars was one of the sites that were forced to pull out of the US in that event, and now they could be making their return to the United States by entering the regulated New Jersey jurisdiction. Nothing's for certain, but there are signs for a potential return.
The Return to New Jersey

Since the Amaya Gaming Group acquired PokerStars back in the middle of 2014, changes like the ones they recently announced have gotten them in a lot of hot water with players. It started off with players reacting negatively towards announcements that PokerStars would offer casino games and other forms of gambling in 2015, and they rallied against this thinking that it would pull recreational players away from the tables.

An American professional online poker player by the name of Byron Kaverman has taken top honors in the EPT Malta High Roller Event. This event had a buy-in of €10,300, and there were a total of 210 players for a prize pool of over €2 million. Kaverman was able to take down €430,800 for first place in this event.
Multiple High Roller Places
Kaverman is no stranger to these top-tier places.

Online poker is really atypical game in terms of how gambling the Internet gambling works as a whole because the maintenance of the player pool is so important. It's natural that the better players are going to win money from those of a lesser skill, but if this happens at too fast of a rate, then it can cause the size of the overall player pool to decline over time. Party Poker is putting in measures to help keep this from happening with a new seating system for cash games.

Full Tilt Poker has recently applied to become a part of the Steam online gaming platform. This platform helps to put out games for online and computer-based play (as well as play through smart televisions), and it could lead to some pretty interesting situations if they're able to get included. We haven't really heard of any online gambling site trying to get in on a gaming network like this before, so it's really a new development in every sense of the word.
How Steam Works

No-limit hold'em is the most popular form of poker in the world, and it's been that way for a little over a decade. Several formats of the game exist, but tournament poker is where all of the fame and glory is at this stage in the game. The World Series of Poker Europe is a good opportunity to get both along with some major payouts, and a restaurant owner from Germany found out for himself with a big win and a bracelet.
Enter Makarios Avramidis

A ploy that we've seen in recent years against different types of online gambling sites is hackers holding up events for a virtual ransom, costing operators tons of money. The Winning Poker Network has been the target of attacks like this in the past, and they saw another big loss tied into a big tournament overlay related to yet another DDOS attack. This attack and others like it are forcing people in the industry to rethink security on multiple levels.
Nature of These Attacks

On April 15, 2011, an event happened in the online poker world that's been dubbed Black Friday. This event had to do with US federal indictments against a number of the top online poker rooms in the world including PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. The Rational Group, owner of PokerStars, made a deal with the Department of Justice to purchase Full Tilt Poker and pay off the balances for all of their players since Full Tilt didn't have the funds to do so on their own.

No matter what type of online poker you play and no matter what stakes you play at, the World Championship of Online Poker at PokerStars is probably on your radar. It happens around this time each year, and it give players a chance to take part in dozens of major events, either as a player or a spectator. Tons of big name pros come out to duke it out and take a piece of a total eight-figure prize pool.

It's really interesting to see how poker has waxed and waned over the past decade and a half. The big poker boom started around 2003 when Chris Moneymaker took down the World Series of Poker, and it started to crash in late 2006 when the UIGEA cut the legs out from under the online poker market. It was further hammered in 2011 with the Black Friday event, but a new television channel shows that poker could be in the middle of a big comeback.
Poker Central TV

The World Championship of Online Poker at PokerStars is considered to be the single-largest online tournament series ever, and it's broken records for the largest prize pools for tournament series and individual events online. This year, there's a Super High Roller event with a $51,000 entry fee that is expected to attract a crowd of well-known players that will see a ton of spectators.